Matt Calkins Builds Appian As A Platform For Digital Transformation And A Culture Of Shared Values

A Series of Forbes Insights Profiles of Thought Leaders Changing the Business Landscape: Matt Calkins, Co-Founder and CEO, Appian.

There's a growing demand for unique software. It's more than a $100 billion a year market, and it's growing dramatically year over year. It's growing because of digital transformation and because companies are looking for solutions that they cannot buy off the shelf from companies like Microsoft, Oracle or SAP. Meanwhile, the growth in the number of people capable of writing that software is very small, creating a global imbalance between supply and demand.

So says Matt Calkins, co-founder and CEO of Appian, the Reston, Virginia-based, publicly-traded firm that positions itself as a platform that makes it easier and faster to create software applications. He wanted to address the world's increasing need for making unique applications with the concept of “drawing” the application instead of coding them. Or what’s now referred to as “Low Code” solutions. Calkins says of this idea, “I'm an economist first, a technologist second, and thought, my approach to technology could be the answer for that. It could be the way that a developer makes 10 or 20 times as much software per person per year.” And it has.

Appian allows people to create low-code applications requiring little to no previous knowledge of application building. “Instead of writing line by line, instead of speaking to a computer in the computer's language, we speak to them in our language. Programming or developing in Appian is often like assembling a Lego model. You've already got all the bricks. Every brick might be an integration to a data source, a definition, a rule, an interface, a form, a chart. You draw the flowchart and then you drag and drop the objects, and you've quickly made an application that Forrester says is 20 times faster than a developer could've done with traditional methods,” says Calkins. Many applications in Appian are built by people who aren't coders at all.

Further, according to Calkins, as an added bonus, when a user is finished, the application can run on every popular mobile device, in addition to the desktop. If you did this the traditional way, you'd have an application that was not easy to modify in the future. With Appian, if you want to modify it, you just go back to the flowchart. You draw new lines. You make a new box. “It couldn't be easier to understand and update. It's a living and growing application, instead of a decaying anchor in your enterprise. Appian is revolutionizing the way unique software is created.”

As an example, Calkins points to the work they are doing with a bank in Australia. The bank rebuilt and rewrote its applications for credit card management, ATM management, fraud management, mortgages, merchant services and loan services all under one application. Instead of having different sets of software applications that require expensive development to work together, they now co-exist in a centrally-constructed, top-down, developer-led applications and the grassroots, non-developer-built applications. “They’re in harmony. They share the same definitions. They share the same workspace. You can comment on one or the other. You log in once, and you're seeing the whole environment, all those applications together at once. We believe anybody can make an application. We just make sure that they're not going to crash your server or do the integration wrong or cause a security breach. We have all that covered. It's carefully sandboxed, and they're only using objects made by developers,” says Calkins.

Calkins founded Appian when he was 26 years old with three other co-founders, all of whom were even younger than he. Not one of them had a degree in science or computer science. Three out of the four originally worked at a local technology company MicroStrategy. “It was a small startup when I joined, and it took off. I was the youngest director at the company, and I had millions of dollars' worth of stock options. When I told them I was leaving, I got a lot of strange looks. ’Who on earth would leave at a moment like this?,’” remembers Calkins.

He walked away from being a multimillionaire at age the age of 26, and was happy to do it, because money was not his objective. “My objective was to create an institution whose values I could shape. And I think Appian has been, throughout, more about values than money. We measure ourselves not by what the company is worth, but by the net impact we've had on our constituents – our employees, partners, clients. And for that matter, anyone who would follow our example. And that to me is the reason for creating the business,” says Calkins.

Calkins believes culture is one of the most important aspects of running a company and he is intimately involved in any touchpoint that shapes the company’s culture. “That's the secret, hidden asset at the core of Appian: an exceptionally strong culture full of talented, generous and successful people who work harmoniously with each other. You can't see that on the balance sheet, but it's the best thing about the company. Company culture is so important because you're going to spend a lot of your life at work, and so wouldn't you want to spend it with people that you admire, with values you can relate to?”

While harmony is key, dissent is highly valued. Debate is encouraged and the company prides itself on being open to a multitude of opinions, respecting them all, and being able to resolve different issues, down to one resolution, and then have everybody get behind it. After all, the company was founded by debaters, not scientists.

Calkins, and two of Appian’s co-founders graduated from Dartmouth, where two co-founders were ranked at the top of the nation in debate. “They are both very bright, and they're well spoken, and they line up their arguments, and I love it. I think that's how ideas become great. If you take an idea and then you put it in front of that firing squad, test it and reshape it with that kind of pressure, then it's going to be great. However, it requires you to check your ego at the door. You have to be open to the possibility that someone else's idea is better than yours, or that their argument has exposed a deficiency in your position. If you're not open to that, then they're talking in vain. If you're comfortable with that, I would highly recommend it," says Calkins of his debate-based company culture.

Calkins is not a typical tech entrepreneur. He grew up in Mill Valley, California, north of San Francisco, enjoying the hillsides full of redwood trees, and hiking home from school every day. He used to take weekends to go camping up and down the California coast. Yosemite is still his favorite place in the world. “It was a beautiful place to live, and some people joke, just like they did when I left MicroStrategy, ‘why would you ever leave?’”

Calkins did leave the redwoods and went to Dartmouth seeking a degree in economics. He chose Dartmouth specifically to be surrounded by wilderness and enjoyed taking walks around the pond to the north of campus, and along the Connecticut River.

On his entrepreneurial inclinations, Calkins says, “Even when I was in college, I assumed that I had to build something of my own. At Dartmouth, I built a political organization and ran it for a couple years, plus I was editor of a newspaper. I knew I wanted to run something, coming out of school. Barring the exceptionally fortuitous series of promotions, at the end of the day, I knew I would start something myself.”

The co-founders were building a steadily, growing business for 17 years before deciding to take the company public. “We'd more or less broken even over that time, so we didn't need money. We needed exposure. We needed publicity and attention. We wanted to show the world that Appian makes the possibility of building unique applications on a platform instead of with lines of code, a reality. The best way to show that was to run that flag up the pole and go public,” says Calkins.

“We're going to be well-positioned to take what's best of the IPO and to discard what's worse about the public company grinder. I think we're going to enjoy the attention, and the well-meaning scrutiny of analysts and investors. I think it'll help bring out the best, just like a good competitor can bring out the best in a company. But I think we'll be able to keep exceptionally stable, partly because I still own 48 percent of the firm, so that takes away some of the quarter-to-quarter paranoia that I think drives some management teams.”

“I am absolutely characterized by urgency. Appian has grown over the last 17 years and is ready to move to the next level, to revolutionize the way unique software is made. I think we can change how software is made, but I’m always open to debate,” concludes Calkins.